Chicago Police Adopt New Limits on Use of Force

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The Chicago police superintendent, Eddie Johnson, last year. “We will aim to de-escalate situations peacefully, with the use of deadly force as a last resort,” he said on Wednesday.CreditCreditTaylor Glascock for The New York Times

CHICAGO — The Chicago Police Department announced new rules on Wednesday that restrict when officers can fire their guns or use other forms of force. The policy instructs officers to defuse tense situations, requires them to seek aid for wounded suspects and limits the circumstances under which a fleeing person can be shot.

“Above all else,” Superintendent Eddie Johnson told a room full of officers and reporters, “we will aim to de-escalate situations peacefully, with the use of deadly force as a last resort.”

Chicago officials, and even some longtime skeptics of the department, hailed the new regulations as a sign that the police here are improving even though federal scrutiny of the department has eased since President Trump was inaugurated.

But the rules set fewer limits on officers than a draft published in October, and some said they did not go far enough to prevent police abuses. The draft would have required officers to use the “least amount of force necessary,” while Wednesday’s version said only that force must be “objectively reasonable, necessary and proportional.”

The new regulations were perceived as one early measure of how cities under pressure to overhaul their police departments may proceed under an administration that does not favor federal consent decrees as a way to compel change.

Craig B. Futterman, a law professor at the University of Chicago, said the “watered-down” 42-page policy “shows a significant retreat” from a promise by Chicago’s leaders to address a pattern of civil rights violations described by federal investigators in the final days of Barack Obama’s presidency. Mayor Rahm Emanuel pledged then to work toward a federal consent decree, but Attorney General Jeff Sessions is skeptical of such agreements, and one seems unlikely to materialize.

For some, including Lori E. Lightfoot, who led a mayoral commission that published a blistering report last year about the Chicago Police Department, the new policy indicated a willingness among city leaders to make tough changes regardless of federal oversight.

“This has been a historic process, a good process, and I think has resulted in a policy we can all embrace and be proud of,” said Ms. Lightfoot, who also leads the Chicago Police Board, which decides disciplinary cases involving officers.

William Calloway, a Chicago activist, appeared alongside police officials on Wednesday and called the rules, which are to take effect later this year, a “big win for us.”

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Protesters blocked the entrance to Interstate 290 in November 2015 after the release of video from the shooting of Laquan McDonald.CreditJoshua Lott for The New York Times

Mr. Futterman had a far different take, saying the department had “shown that it is incapable of reform by itself” and that it urgently needs federal intervention. He said that the new rules on Taser use, especially, were weak and that the policy gave officers too much discretion to use more force than necessary.

Chicago is struggling with parallel crises of endemic violence and distrust of the Police Department. More than 200 people have been murdered in Chicago already this year, and three officers have been shot so far in May.

Kevin Graham, the newly elected president of Chicago’s Fraternal Order of Police, said that the rules did not need to be rewritten and that the officers he represents were already doing heroic work in dangerous conditions.

“What I have not heard said, and what needs to be said, is that people do not have the right to resist arrest,” he said. “Now they want to try and change the narrative and say, ‘Oh, well, we’re using too much force.’ We aren’t. I’m not saying that that never happens, but I’m saying that I certainly don’t see that on a daily basis.”

The outcry that led to the review of use-of-force policies can be traced to the 2014 killing of Laquan McDonald, a black teenager who was shot 16 times by a white police officer as several other officers watched. The new rules would require officers to intervene verbally if they see their colleagues using unnecessary force. In the McDonald case, the accounts given by other officers at the scene supported the story of the officer who fired the shots but were contradicted by video.

Chicago officers will also face new restrictions on using deadly force against fleeing suspects: It will be allowed only when the person poses an immediate threat. Last summer, an unarmed teenager running away from officers here was fatally shot in the back after crashing a stolen car.

Some national supporters of police reform praised Chicago’s new guidelines, saying they went beyond the policies of many other departments around the nation. The standards adhere to many of the recommendations made last year by the Police Executive Research Forum, including the principle that the “highest priority is the sanctity of human life.”

“This represents the next generation of use-of-force policy,” said David A. Harris, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law who has written extensively about police accountability.

A requirement that officers try to de-escalate volatile encounters “when it is safe and feasible” has been debated by other departments. The oversight agency for the Los Angeles Police Department was criticized for being too vague after approving similar language. In Cleveland, where the police are operating under a federal consent decree, a proposed set of rules would also require, rather than suggest, de-escalation efforts.

In Chicago, even among those supportive of the new policy, there was recognition that the restrictions would not be an immediate fix. “The proof,” Ms. Lightfoot said, “clearly will be how interactions between individual officers and the people on the street are transformed.”

Mitch Smith reported from Chicago, and Timothy Williams from New York.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: Chicago Police Adopt New Restrictions on Use of Force. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe